Who Really Found the Higgs Boson - Issue 43: Heroes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/who-really-found-the-higgs-boson-rp
To those who say that there is no room for genius in modern science because everything has been discovered, Fabiola Gianotti has a sharp reply. “No, not at all,” says the former spokesperson of the ATLAS Experiment, the largest particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. “Until the fourth of July, 2012 we had no proof that nature allows for elementary scalar fields. So there is a lot of space for genius.” She is referring to the discovery of the Higgs boson two years ago—potentially one of the most important advances in physics in the past half century. It is a manifestation of the eponymous field that permeates all of space, and completes the standard model of physics: a sort of baseline description for the existence and behavior of essentially everything there is. By any (...)